A couple of years ago, during a family get together at her house, my aunt gave me an ugly brown, metal box. With this box came a simple explanation that she had saved it from my great grandmothers house after her funeral. She told me that she'd kept it for several years intending to give it to me when I got married. She then handed me this ugly box and I promptly asked what the heck it was...
As I asked, I struggled to pull the lid off. My aunt told me what I'd already discovered. It was my grandmother's recipe box. Made from an old painted lunchbox of my great grandfathers, it overflowed with newspaper clipping, slips of paper, and cookbooks. I thumbed through it briefly but was interrupted by the festivities. Back at my house it was placed on a shelf and all but forgotten.
When we moved into our new house last summer it was once again placed on a shelf, where it sat until a rainy Saturday morning a few days ago. As I made myself a cup of much needed coffee and thought of all the things I really needed to work on that day, the now dusty brown box caught my eye. I pulled it off the shelf and deposited it and myself (coffee in hand) at the dinning room table.
I started pulling things out one by one. And...piece by piece discovered my great grandmother, a woman I couldn't remember as well as I'd like, was very much like me.
She obviously, like me, thought anything could be made better with a little paint. She painted the broken plaid lunchbox brown. She clipped and collected recipes from any and every source imaginable. Recipes for every kind of food from Salmon to Sugar Cookies and even a few recipes for soaps and cleaners.
I quickly learned that the box contained more than just recipes and it was just as clear that some of the contents pre-dated my grandmother. A remedy catalog from 1908, books on livestock and farming from the 1920's... There were receipts, booklets, catalogs, and articles from every decade from 1908 to the 1990's. Each of these things a piece of my great grandmothers life. Things that for some reason she valued.
I myself keep a couple of boxes like this. I started it when I was younger with magazine clippings. To this day I still clip recipes, home decorating ideas, and all the things that inspire me. The thing that excites me the most from Elma's box though was a packet of seeds. Apparently she too had a passion for flowers and gardening.
So this spring instead of my regular beloved Burpee morning glory seeds...I think I'll plant these.
